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The following is a Research Innovation and Development Grants in Economics
(RIDGE) project summary. More...
All projects summarized were conducted under research grants from ERS and the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of ERS or USDA.
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resulting from the project summarized here.
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Project:
The Material Well-Being of Single Mother Households in the 1980s
and 1990s: What Can We Learn from Food Spending?Year: 2004 Research Center: The Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago Investigator: DeLeire, Thomas, and Helen Levy Institution: Michigan State University Project Contact:
Thomas DeLeire
Department of Economics
Michigan State University
101 Marshall-Adams Hall
East Lansing, MI 48824
Phone: 517-353-7167
E-mail: deleire@msu.edu Summary: The research objective was to analyze trends from 1986 to 2001 in the
composition of the food budgets of single mothers relative to single women
without children and to married mothers. During this period, a combination
of welfare reform, expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, and other
policy changes led to increases in the labor supply of single mothers and a
decline in their participation in cash welfare programs. This research
analyzes whether there was a shift in the composition of the food budget
from food consumed at home to food consumed away from home.
Research has shown that single mothers’ food expenditures increased during
the 1990s and concludes that single mothers' well-being increased or at least
did not decrease. This work re-examines whether single mothers’ well-being
changed by exploring the possibility that the increase in food spending may
in fact have been driven by a change in the composition of food spending
rather than a true increase in consumption. Microdata on food spending
from the Consumer Expenditure Survey-Diary Component for 1986-2001
were analyzed. This study used multivariate regression to control for differences
in household composition and other observable characteristics, such
as race, between single-mother households and other households.
The research results found that the increase in single mothers’ food spending
over this period was entirely driven by a shift from spending on food at home
to spending on food away from home. The study results suggest that caution is
needed before concluding that increases in total expenditure on food results in
an improvement in material or nutritional well-being. Given the rise in obesity
throughout the general population during this period, these findings also
suggest that future research examine whether the changes in the pattern of food
spending for single mothers were accompanied by increases in obesity in this
subpopulation relative to other groups of women.
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